A week on, he thought it might be useful to review the logic behind the move and answer some of the commonly asked questions. Innovatively, he addresses them in a blog.
"The simple reason to move forward with VC funding," writes Bickel, "is that it helps enhance the Professional Open Source business model."
What does JBoss mean exactly by that term, 'Professional Open Source'?
"We think that there are a lot of developers, IT shops, software, systems and integration partners," Bickel explains, "that want a 'safe' open source project to use."
By 'safe' what Bickel means, essentially, is two things: 24x7 production support and partners
"24x7 production support is not only someone answering a phone or e-mail," he stresses, "but having an escalation procedure in place, improving our ability to fix bugs, provide patches and roll them into future release cycles."
As for partners, "JBoss is very, very widely used by software, systems and integration vendors," Bickel says. "These partners add value to the core JBoss and take the combined product or service to market. By having a company like JBoss standing behind the open source project and continuing to move it forward, as well as provide that back end production support, these partners can feel more comfortable continuing their investments in JBoss."
"There are plenty of other areas like Training, J2EE Certification, Indemnification, etc. that benefit from having a real company stand behind them," Bickel continues. "JBoss's business had grown to the point where it needed to move to the next level. Think of it as V2.0 of the company."
Bickel then lays down exactly what the new business plan entails.
"We laid down a new business plan in September, 2003, that was based around shifting from a consulting focus to helping customers that had moved or were moving JBoss into Production environments," he says.
"Over the past year, there's been a major shift in who's using JBoss and how they're using it. Customers are moving JBoss into real production applications - enterprise level, mission critical apps. This coincides very well with our recent offerings of Production Support."
"We have seen Production Support cause a steep increase in the company's bookings," he adds, "and we find that customers are not only saving money on licenses, but our pricing based on the number of applications, and not the number of CPU's is a lower cost model that is easier to administer. Additionally, a number of partners are entering into third level support agreements with JBoss. This is good because it keeps our sales and marketing costs low."
Will JBoss continue to be an LGPL biased company? Yes, Bickel says. "We think this gives our customers and partners the assurance that the software stays free, and partners are able to embed the software," he adds.
This is a good business model, he says, because JBoss's development costs are lower "due to the power of the community and the productivity and quality of open source development."
